Google to add Square sellers' direct product listings on search, shopping platforms

Dive Brief:

With online ever more important for small businesses, Square and Google unveiled a new integration with the Google Merchant Center to help Square merchants to find new customers through the search engine's direct product listings, according to a Thursday press release.
Merchants using Square for Retail can now add their product catalog to Google's search, shopping tab, images and maps features, as well as YouTube. Customers can then click on the listings and buy products directly from sellers' online stores.
This initiative marks the first integration driven by the Stitch Labs team, an operations management platform for scaling brands that Square acquired last year, per the announcement.

Dive Insight:

Square's integration with Google is meant to help consumers seamlessly shop with small businesses and is part of Square's overall efforts to provide useful features for merchants on its platform.

The Square partnership follows the expansion of a similar collaboration the search giant has with Shopify in May. As part of the deal, Google simplified how Shopify merchants could get their products showcased on Google's mobile-first browsing features.

Google has been expanding its shopping platform through additional partnerships with WooCommerce and GoDaddy, according to a Thursday announcement. Merchants from these sites will also be able to integrate their product offerings with Google's features.

In its pursuit of useful features for merchants, Square is reportedly planning to offer checking and savings accounts to small business customers, according to Bloomberg. Based on the code for a recent update to Square's app for Apple's iOS software, those accounts won't charge monthly service fees, overdraft or minimum balance fees for its checking accounts, Bloomberg reported.

"Online sales have been a significant revenue driver for sellers of all types and sizes over the past year," Alyssa Henry, executive vice president of Square, said in a statement. "We're looking forward to partnering with Google to unlock even more opportunities for retailers as they look toward the future and begin to rebuild."

The deal with Google and Square comes as Amazon faces more scrutiny over its seller practices. Last week, Amazon was hit with an antitrust lawsuit from Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine, which accused the e-commerce giant of fixing online prices through its third-party seller platform.